Many elderly are independent, contributing members of society, with activities requiring cognitive functions dependent on information processing components vulnerable to aging, e.g., driving. Understanding age-related cognitive change and contributors to """"""""successful"""""""" cognitive aging is important (Rowe & Kahn, 1998). Use of many cognitive functions does not decrease with age but structures and mechanisms that support these functions may be age-sensitive. The goal under this fellowship is to explore age-related changes in visuospatial selective attention. Although attention research has adequately shown age effects in divided attention, the data on visuospatial attention are controversial and scant. Studies at the Cognitive Science Laboratory have shown that visuospatial attention is age sensitive. Results from studies of visuospatial attention in cued visual search and detection tasks (Posner, 1980; Hawkins et. al, 1990) form the basis for Greenwood & Parasuraman?s (1999) model of selective attention identifying three independent components which may be uniquely affected by aging: eye movements, attentional shifts, spatial scaling. A model of the attentional focus with regard to eye movements and changes in aging is proposed. Three novel visual search tasks, which measure eye movements, are designed with the aim of investigating the relation of eye movements to the components of shifting and scaling visuospatial attention, in aging.
